Shortage of water resources is becoming an important factor for restricting agricultural development in China and even the world. The current water resource share per capita in China is only ¼ of the world level per capita and water shortage has become one of the main obstacles faced by industrial and agricultural production in China. It is important to cultivate species tolerant to drought in the breeding of multiple crops. For example, rice is one of the most important alimentary crops in China, with its total yield around 40% of the total yield of food crops; while at the same time, it is a crop that has a requirement for a large amount of water. The increasingly draconic shortage of water resources has become an important issue faced by rice producers. It is advantageous to cultivate rice species tolerant to drought in order to realize high yield and stable production of rice under limited water resources. It is further of practical significance to study the genetic basis for drought tolerance of rice, and to strengthen the identification and utilization of drought tolerance gene resources of Oryza. 
Common wild rice (O. rufipogon Griff.), as the ancestor of the cultivated rice (O. sativa L.), is an important gene bank for genetic improvement of cultivated rice. Since the evolution of wild rice into cultivated rice, not only have many agronomic characteristics been greatly changed, but also genetic diversity has been reduced and the number of alleles has decreased, e.g., it has been shown that the numbers of alleles found in cultivated rice is only 60% of wild rice.
Jiangxi Dongxiang wild rice (O. rufipogon Griff.), which has a reputation of being a “plant panda,” is presently the wild rice having the most northerly (28° 14′ N) habitat in the world, having good isolation conditions away from cultivated rice, having no gene introgression from cultivated rice and having the properties of low temperature tolerance and drought tolerance. It is of significant importance for rice production to identify and clone drought tolerance associated genes from wild rice.